


i'll wait for your lead to come in

by wants2die



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: 5x12 The Pandorica Opens, AU, Alternate Universe, Canon Divergence, Fezturion, M/M, The Pandorica
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 22:04:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1915524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wants2die/pseuds/wants2die
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The universe is unraveling. The stars have ceased to exist. Amy Pond lies dead on the ground in Stonehenge, and Rory Williams sits outside a stone box waiting for his Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll wait for your lead to come in

Amy is dead. 

Amelia Jessica Pond is dead, and it is all Rory Williams’ fault.

For a solid five minutes all he can do is stand there, staring down at Amy’s limp body in shock. Her arm is curled over her side, hiding the wound there from his sight. Ginger hair is fanned over her neck and shoulders, and she looks downright vulnerable.

The thought is almost enough to tease a tear from Rory’s plastic ducts, because Amy never looks vulnerable. Even when facing down big vampire fish, lizard men, and snake things from outer space with hideous teeth, she’s always strong and powerful, kicking and fighting and quipping until the very end. 

That’s not exactly true, Rory thinks, and he might have laughed at the thought in a morbid sort of way had the woman who had been in possession of his heart since he was seven not been lying in front of him unbreathing, unblinking, heart not beating in her chest. After all, the very end came approximately six minutes ago (six minutes and seventeen seconds, to be exact, he’s not sure what but something in his plastic brain can tell the time exactly) and Amy passed looking the most open and terrified Rory had ever seen her. 

He does laugh, then, the sound wheezing up from inside his chest painfully, and it’s choked and dry and halfway through turns into a sob. 

Rory stands there sobbing, no tears falling from his eyes to wet his cheeks but crying all the same. 

He doesn’t breathe for a very, very long time, and the few shattered breaths he does decide to suck in are all shuddering, painful, his lungs flooding with oxygen that he’s plenty sure he no longer needs. 

“Rory!” comes a familiar voice from in front of him, and when Rory straightens up he sees the Doctor standing there, topped with a fez and brandishing a mop in his left hand. 

“Rory the Roman!” the Doctor continues, oblivious to the centurion’s anguish and the corpse lying beside him. “Listen, you’ve got to get me out of the Pandorica.”

He leaves his sadness behind for a second, and confusion and annoyance immediately rush up in its place. “But you’re not in the Pandorica,” he says, because the Doctor is clearly there, in front of him, and if Rory’s not in the Pandorica then the Doctor can’t be either. He doesn’t have the patience to deal with the Doctor’s nonsense right now, not when Amy is dead. 

“Yes, I am,” the Doctor insists. “Well, I’m not currently, but I was. Back then. Which is back now from your point of view, but it’s back then from mine. Anyway, it’s not hard to open from the outside. Just point and press.”

The Doctor reaches inside his jacket and extracts his sonic screwdriver, which he presses carefully into Rory’s hands.

“Listen to me, Rory Williams, I am entrusting you with the safety of the entire universe,” he says quietly, his eyes - which are really a lovely shade of bluegreen, Rory’s not quite sure why he’s never noticed them before - boring into Rory’s. “So you’d better keep me and my screwdriver safe, or you’ll have the whole of the universe after you.” 

He grins. “Good luck.”

Then, with a quick press of a button, he’s gone, and Rory’s left alone in Stonehenge in 102 AD holding a sonic screwdriver given to him by a Time Lord carrying a mop, wearing a fez, and to top it all off, he’d just been reborn as a Roman centurion made out of plastic and accidently killed his girlfriend. 

Rory wishes he could hate the Doctor for this, but no one can hate that man, no matter how infuriating he can be sometimes.

With a slight sigh, he heads down the stairs - why are there stairs in the middle of Stonehenge? It’s the bloody Doctor’s fault, of course - and into the stone cavern beneath. 

His hands are sort of shaky as he presses the button on the Doctor’s screwdriver, but it does the trick and soon the stone sides of the giant box are receding to reveal the Time Lord chained within, who gives Rory a disbelieving look as the chair retracts and the Doctor is released. 

“How did you do that?” the Doctor asks, picking himself up off of the floor and brushing himself off. 

“You gave me this,” Rory says, waving the screwdriver in the air. 

“No, I did not,” the Doctor says pointedly, and after rummaging around in his coat pocket he produces a sonic screwdriver identical to the one Rory is holding. 

“You did,” Rory insists. “Just look at it.”

Tentatively, as if he’s afraid he might accidentally break the universe, the Doctor reaches forwards and taps the tip of his screwdriver against Rory’s. They fizz and spark a bit, which Rory takes to mean that they’re the same screwdriver. 

“That’s temporal energy,” the Doctor announces. “Same screwdriver, different points in the timestream. Which means it really was me who gave it to you. Will give it to you. Me from the future anyway. I’ve got a future. That’s nice. That,” - he points at a petrified Dalek in the corner - “ not so much.”

“Yeah,” Rory agrees, because Amy - he has to suppress the pang in his heart as her name surfaces in his head - told him about Daleks. But this one looks more like a fossil than the living ones Amy described. “What are they?”

“History has collapsed,” says the Doctor simply. “Whole races have been deleted from history. These are just the after-images. Echoes in time and space. Imprints of the never-were.”

“Er, what does that mean?” Rory has to ask, because even the neatly sorted databanks of his plastic brain - it is really quite terrifying how organised it is in here - don’t have the foggiest what never-were means. 

The Doctor steeples his hands underneath his nose. 

“Total event collapse. The universe literally never happened.”

“But... we’re still here. We’ve not been erased, have we? So what’s keeping us safe?”

The Doctor answers, “Nothing. Nothing at all. We’re not safe, we’re simply at the eye of a storm of time and sooner or later it will extinguish the last light left. Us.”

Rory blinks. As soon as he does this, he realises that it’s the first time he’s blinked in a long time, longer than he can remember. He marks it down to his being plastic. 

“So... what can we do?”

“Again, nothing,” the Doctor announces. “The universe is going to delete itself and there is absolutely nothing that I can do.”

The Doctor sits down in front of the Pandorica, hands curled around his knees. 

“I can’t save everyone, Rory,” he whispers. “All of time is going to unravel and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Everyone’s going to die. No, scratch that, no one is going to have existed in the first place.”

Rory sighs, plunking down next to the Doctor. 

“You’re the Doctor,” he says simply. “The Oncoming Storm. The Predator. The Destroyer of Worlds. You’re the stuff of dreams and nightmares. Somewhere on this Earth, people are whispering about the man with the strange clothes who falls from the sky in a blue box and chases the monsters away. Somewhere deep in space on a faraway planet, an alien is telling its child that the Doctor’s going to get them if they don’t stay in bed tonight. There are civilisations that quake in fear at just the sound of your name. There are civilisations that worship you as a god because, quite frankly, you are one.”

He grabs the Doctor’s hand. 

“You’re the Lord of Time, and there is no way in Hell that you are giving up now.”

Rory pushes himself off of the ground, pulling the Doctor with him. 

“So grab your sonic screwdriver and put your fez back on because you are going to save the universe whether you like it or not.”

The Doctor laughs. 

Rory likes that laugh quite a lot. He wishes it would come about more often. 

“There’s a chance...” the Doctor trails off the second he starts talking, staring thoughtfully at Rory. “It should be safe, the universe is crumbling at every moment in time so two thousand years from now is just as good of a time as right now.”

He stares at the Doctor, and while he’s sure his mouth is gaping open he’s too busy being amazed at the Doctor to bother to close it. 

“Er... what?”

The Doctor sighs, clearly disappointed in Rory’s lack of ability to understand the mad lingo only the Doctor really speaks. “River is stuck in 2010,” he says as if it should make everything perfectly obvious. When Rory doesn’t instantly show recognition, he elaborates. “June 26, 2010, to be exact. My vortex manipulator is fried, and the TARDIS is stuck with River. So we’re stuck in 102 AD, but we need to be 1908 years in the future. The only way we can get there is waiting, but this is my last regeneration and even I can’t survive two thousand years without dying at least once.”

Rory thinks he might have understand at least one of those words, but he got the gist of the Doctor’s babble. At least, he really hopes he did, because he doesn’t think the Doctor is in a very repeat-y mood at the moment. 

“We’re going to stay here and wait for two thousand years?” he asked, tone tinged with disbelief. 

“Well, 1908, but basically, yes. Except there’s still one problem. Time Lords can only regenerate twelve times, and I’ve already used up all of mine. And I’ve had some extraordinarily long lives, but even I can’t live on for two thousand years without expiring from old age. So I won’t survive, which makes this entire plan a bit rubbish, because, no offense, Rory, but you’re not going to be able to save River, the TARDIS, Earth, and the rest of the universe with only my sonic screwdriver and your brain.”

“None taken,” Rory mutters. 

“There has to be something!” the Doctor hisses, seeming not to hear Rory. “Something glaringly obvious, something right in front of my nose, something I’m missing! Think!”

“Uh, Doctor...?” Rory says, tapping the man on the shoulder, because he’s just realised something that the Doctor hasn’t, and although he wants to spend at least an hour gloating, there isn’t enough time to do that. 

“What is it, Rory? I’m a little bit busy, if you hadn’t noticed,” the Doctor snaps furiously. 

“It’s just... the Pandorica,” Rory replies hesitantly, his eyebrows raising. 

The Doctor glances at the Pandorica. Then back at Rory. Then the Pandorica again. Then back to Rory, but his eyes are wide. He runs a hand haphazardly through his hair. 

“Rory Williams, you are a genius!” the Doctor exclaims. 

And then the Doctor kisses him. 

He freezes, because he’s not used to kissing boys anymore and its been so long since he kissed anyone since Amy and it’s the Doctor, for God’s sake, but then he relaxes into the kiss, because the Doctor’s lips are warm and soft and taste slightly of cherries and Coke and damn if he isn’t a good kisser.

The Doctor steps back after a second and his eyes are slightly fogged and Rory takes a moment to appreciate how insane this situation actually is, before the Doctor opens his mouth and everything else ceases to matter. 

“This box,” says the Doctor rather grandly, waving his hand in the direction of the Pandorica, “is the ultimate prison. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. You can’t even escape it by dying. It literally forces you to stay alive.”

Rory frowns. 

“So, what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” he wonders aloud. 

“You have the run of Earth for two thousand years, I suppose,” the Doctor replies, already turned around and examining the Pandorica. “Well. 1908. As long as you don’t stay for too long in one place, you should be safe. Don’t get in the way of any monsters. There are certainly other races in the eye of the storm with us. Be safe, Rory Williams.”

In an instant, Rory’s mind is made up.

“No.”

“Excuse me?” the Doctor replies, turning around to face Rory and wrinkling his nose slightly. If Rory’s heart were still beating properly, he’s sure it would have skipped a beat at how cute the Doctor’s expression is. 

“You’re going to be in that box for two thousand years, yeah?”

“Like I said, 1908, but yes.” The Doctor nods, but his frown deepens. “Don’t worry. I should be safe.”

“Should be?” Rory says, stepping up to the Doctor.

“Nothing can get into this box. Absolutely nothing.”

“You got into this box, didn’t you?” 

“There’s only one of me. I counted.”

Rory grits his teeth at that, because damnit, Doctor, now is not the time for sarcasm. 

“This box needs a guard,” Rory says calmly. “I killed the last one.”

The Doctor shakes his head violently. “No, Rory, absolutely not. Don’t even think about it. Go off and have adventures. Make some friends. You’ve got 1908 years of life. Live them.”

“You’ll be all alone.”

“I won’t feel it. I won’t feel anything.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“Two thousand years, Rory. Two thousand years, and all you’d be doing was safeguarding this wonky old box. It would drive you mad, Rory Williams.”

Rory shakes his head. “Will you be safer if I stay?”

The Doctor looks down at his lap, fiddling with the button on a strap.

“Doctor. Look me in the eye and tell me you won’t be safer if I stay.”

“Rory, you-”

“Answer me!” Rory shouts, gripping the Doctor’s shoulders and shaking him. 

“Yes. Obviously,” the Time Lord replies, not looking him in the eye.

Rory lets go of the Doctor. 

“Then how could I leave you?” he asks, his voice low and quiet.

The Doctor scowls, fixing the last of the straps. “Why do you have to be so human?” he asks, his tone matching Rory’s.

“Because right now, I’m not.” Rory whispers back. 

The Doctor’s frown deepens. “Listen to me, Rory Williams. You’re not immortal. Keep yourself safe, keep out of danger, and don’t get hurt. Any and all damage is permanent. If you get bored, do a crossword puzzle once they’re invented. Stay away from heat, and radio signals as soon as they come around. If you get killed, I will go back in time and murder you myself.”

Without thinking, Rory leans forward and presses his lips lightly against the Doctor’s. 

“See you in 1908 years,” he whispers, and without another word he steps back and grabs the screwdriver, sealing the Doctor into the Pandorica. 

He steps down, draws his sword, and settles down to the longest stint of guard duty in history.

**Author's Note:**

> I imagine that once the Doctor reboots the universe, Amy Pond will pop right back in Leadworth, ready to marry Rory and call her Raggedy Man back into existence, since the events that led to her death wouldn't have happened in this timeline. I don't think I could stand killing off my glorious Pond permanently.


End file.
